Epicurus on Happiness - Epicuro e a Felicidade - Alain de Botton

0:26 Ever since ancient times, human beings have looked to philosophy for the secret of happiness. But few philosophers have come up with more suggestive or more relevant answers than one born on the Greek island of Samos, off the coast of modern Turkey, 341 years before the birth of Christ. His name was Epicurus. Very little about him has survived. All of his books have been lost across the centuries, leaving his philosophy of happiness to be reconstructed from just a few fragments. Epicurus believed that we could all find a way to be happy. The problem was, quite simply, that we were looking in the wrong place.

1:30 Unlike many philosophers, Epicurus' idea of happiness actually sounds rather fun. He didn't think we should feel guilty about wanting to have a pleasurable, enjoyable life, and promised that he could show us how to. Of course, you might wonder why you need a philosopher at all to teach you how to have a good time. We seem to think that the key to happiness is really pretty easy. It's all about having a lot of money. So we can come to places like this and go shopping. But before we reach for our wallets, Epicurus wanted us to stop and think. It's easy to imagine that money can solve everything, but can it?

2:15 Epicurus was committed to a life of happiness. He liked sex, laughter and beauty, but crucially spent his time pointing out that happiness is in fact rather a tricky issue. And a philosopher might help you to find it more easily than a credit card ever could. That Epicurus was in favour of pleasure at all shocked many of his ancient Greek contemporaries. His philosophy became synonymous with a lotus-eating lifestyle. To this day, people who love luxurious eating and drinking can sometimes be described as Epicurean. In fact, that's a complete misunderstanding. What time do you think I always feel like I am?

3:05 Epicurus said that pleasure was the most important thing in life, and yet if we actually look at the way that he lived, it seemed he led far from a luxurious life. His house was very simple, his clothes were extremely basic, he always drank water rather than wine, he found fish much too expensive, and he was happy just eating meals with bread, vegetables and a few olives. He once asked a friend, send me a pot of cheese so that I can have a feast whenever I like. These were the kinds of tastes of a man who described pleasure At the heart of Epicurus's philosophy is a simple thought, that we aren't very good at knowing what will make us happy. Though we may feel powerfully drawn towards material

3:55 things and be convinced that they are what we require to be happy, we're often wrong. What we want is not always what we need. and nothing shows that up more starkly than our impulse to go shopping. I like shopping. Most weeks it's just a couple of bags up to, I don't know, sometimes like ten, twelve bags, something else. I like designer names. Dolce & Gabbana stuff, these clothes, DKNY, and I love Gucci clothes as well. Stephen Perry is a hairdresser from Liverpool who spends all his spare time shopping. I suppose, like, I could resist, Usually I don't, usually it's just like going to shop anyway. Although when I go out buying all this stuff, it makes me happy. At the end of the month when the credit

4:40 card and the store card bills and the loan repayments come out and stuff like that, then that doesn't make me happy because I see how much is going out every month on death. Nothing to address, yeah? Sports watch, do you tag on? Yeah. Yeah, the one with this word, face behind. How many watches have you got? This one? Not really that many, it's probably about... 10. You've only got 10 watches? Only 10. I've only got one. What's the one you're wearing now? Wearing a spoon watch at the minute. Because I like this just for general every day. Because it's only like £99. Stephen often gets into debt, and I couldn't help wondering if his desire to go shopping might be a bit out of control. What's the fancy watch? The £1,000 type

5:25 watch. Oh, my God. That's amazing. So what's the craziest thing you've bought in terms of, like, bad impulse buying? A pair of shorts. From where? From a shopping mall in Liverpool. These are them actually. They didn't have my size, so I thought, these will fit me. But you put them on and they just tend to look like truly horrendous, like cycling shorts sort of thing. How much did they cost? I don't know, about £50. 50, 60 coats and like that. They were never taken back. The same as these jeans. I mean, these have still got the labels on. Because you just got

6:12 these home and they were like... They were miles too long, miles too big. I did mean to take them back, but I don't like taking things back. Did you ever get home and you think you're surrounded by shopping bags and you're thinking, God, it's all a bit... What am I going to do with all this? Yeah, especially when you come home and you've got bags everywhere and you just... Why have I spent all that? And then the credit card bill comes in at the end of the month and you think, oh, why did I spend all that sort of thing? In a way, we're all a bit like Stephen, people who shop too much. Epicurus thought he knew why. We don't understand what we really need and so fall prey to manic substitute desires for huge numbers of ill-fitting trousers or

6:58 countless pairs of shoes. But Epicurus declared, that he had actually discovered what we did need. And luckily, for anyone without much money, the ingredients of happiness come pretty cheap. And the first ingredient we need is friends. Epicurus took the idea of friendship very seriously, so seriously that he made an extremely radical innovation. When he came to Athens at 306 BC, at the age of 35, he bought a large house just outside the city of Athens, in this place here, which we called the garden. Of course, at that time it was rather beautiful, a bit more beautiful than it is now, where it seems to be a taxi graveyard. What he did was that he bought this house and asked a group of friends to move in with him. The house was quite large, so there was room enough for everyone to

7:45 have their own quarters, at the same time as coming together for meals and conversations in the common rooms of the house. What Epicurus was doing was picking up on a rather common sense point, which is that friends are a major source of happiness. But I think where he was distinctive was in his idea that in order to really benefit from friends, you had to see them not just occasionally, not just for the odd drink in a bar or the odd chat on the phone, but you had to live with these friends at all times, so they'd be your permanent companions. And I think that was his distinctive idea of happiness. He wouldn't catch Epicurus devouring lunch on his own in a burger bar. He recommended that we try never even to eat a snack alone. Before you eat or drink anything, he said, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or

8:33 drink. For feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf. The second thing Epicurus thought we needed to be happy was freedom. And in order to achieve it, he and his friends decided to leave Athens altogether. For them, to be free meant to be financially independent, economically self-sufficient, not answerable to horrible bosses for their income. So they resolved to leave city life and its competitive and gossipy atmosphere behind them once and for all. So they left Athens and started what could best have been described as a commune. We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday life and politics, Epicurus wrote. And that's precisely what they did.

9:20 The life was simple, but at least they enjoyed their freedom. They didn't mind if they looked shabby or didn't have as much money as other people, because they were self-sufficient and had gained their independence from what other people thought. There was, in the financial sense, nothing to prove. Epicurus believed there was a third ingredient necessary for happiness, and that was an analysed life, by which he meant a life in which we take time off to reflect on our worries, to analyse what is troubling us. Our anxieties quickly diminish if we give ourselves time to think them through. And to do that, we need to take a step back from the noisy distractions of the commercial world and to find time and space for quiet

10:06 thinking about our lives. Of course, having loads of money has never made anyone unhappy, but I think the lovely idea in Epicurus is that if you're denied money for whatever reason, and yet you have his three goods, that is, you've got friends, you've got an analyzed life, and you're self-sufficient, then you'll never be denied happiness. And conversely, if you've got loads of money, but you're lacking friends, you haven't got a self-sufficient life, you're not doing a lot of analyzing, then you'll never be happy, according to Epicurus. So if we try and draw this relationship between happiness and money on a graph, imagine that on this side of the graph, you've got levels of happiness, happy you are, and then on this side, you've got levels of income. Now for Epicurus, so long as you've got enough money to provide you with the essentials of

10:51 life, you can start to be happy fairly early on if you have his three goods. And you won't get any happier the more money you accumulate. Level of happiness stays pretty steady. However, if you've got loads of money, and yet you haven't got any friends, you're not self-sufficient, you've got loads of anxieties, then your level of happiness is going to stay very flat. And I think that's a lovely and consoling idea for anyone who's either worried about the fact they may lose their money or is denied the chance to make any. But if the ingredients of happiness are so simple, why aren't more of us actually happy? Epicurus blamed advertising. As we've just seen, advertising can be enormously seductive. It tends to make us feel

11:36 that there are all sorts of things missing from our lives. But Epicurus insisted that we only need three things to be happy, friends, freedom and an analysed life. If he's right, why then do we want to shop so much? Epicurus's answer would be that the commercial world slyly associates the things it wants to sell us with the things it knows that we need. So, for example, this might persuade us to buy Bacardi, but only by blurring the fact that it's really the friends we're looking for. This one tries to sell us perfume by naming it after the thing we're all really after, freedom.

12:22 And this one flogs us whiskey by promising the calm resolution of our problems that only an analysed life could bring us. And it's this blurring of our desires that makes us so confused about what it is we want. What are the most important things that make you happy? The people around me, if they're happy, then I'm happy. And like if work's going good, then that makes me happy as well. But do you ever think, what if I threw all this away, threw all that away, all these jumpers, and just concentrated on getting the work right, getting the family and friends right, I would never have to go to Trafford Centre again? Yeah. Because if I shopped to cheer

13:10 myself up, if I'm already happy, then I don't need to cheer myself up to myself. At the minute, I'm fairly happy, so I'm miserably not shopping quite as much as what I used to. But who's to say that next week something might happen and then I'll just have to go to shop. Epicurus may have lived more than 2,000 years ago, but he would have understood the pressures that make people like Stephen shop so much. And he had a bold and practical solution to counter them. The place to find it is here, in a dusty

13:57 and remote corner of southwestern Turkey. That Epicurus should still speak to us at all is something of a miracle, as every one of the 300 books he wrote has been lost. But his philosophy developed into a kind of creed, almost like a religion, and remained popular for some 400 years. Epicurean communities were founded in places like this all across the ancient world, and it's largely thanks to them that fragments of what Epicurus wrote have survived. I've come with local archaeologist Mustafa Adak to see the ruins of the ancient town of Oinoanda. Oinoander was

14:43 once home to 25,000 people, a place with a lavish theatre, a busy marketplace or agora, and a huge aqueduct. It was also home to a follower of Epicurus' philosophy, one of the wealthiest citizens of the town, a man called Diogenes of Oinoander. Around the AD 120s, this Diogenes took a highly unusual decision. He paid for an enormous wall to be put up, as part of a giant structure known as a stoa, on which he had inscribed Epicurus's entire philosophy of happiness, so that all the citizens of his town could learn and be inspired by it. So where are we walking now? We're walking now in the old aggro of Oenohanda, where

15:31 Diogenes had his stoa. what we're seeing now is this is bits of the wall. The store was broken up by earthquake, most probably, and there are more than 200 fragments of the inscription. This is one of the fragments. This is the beginning of the inscription. And this is where Diogenes tries to explain why he put up the wall in the first place. Yes, he's saying that if there were one or two persons who are lost, He could educate them personally, but there are many people, so he decided to put up the stone. Right. So if there were just one or two people who didn't know how to be happy, he'd go and talk

16:18 to them, but because there are so many, the best way to help them is to actually put up a wall in the middle of the town. That's right. That's the explanation he gives here in this fragment. What a lovely thing to do. Diogenes was acting on a crucial idea in Epicurus, that in order to live wisely, it isn't enough just to read a philosophical argument once or twice. We need constant reminders of it, or we'll forget. When we're encouraged to go shopping by bright lights and inviting displays, we're quickly liable to lose sight of our true desires. So we have to counteract the influence of advertising by creating advertisements which say what we really do need. and that's why Diogenes put up his wall.

17:09 What is this here? This is another very fascinating fragment. The massive limestone wall originally stood right next to the marketplace of the town. Inhabitants shopping in the boutiques of Oinoander were warned to expect little happiness from the activity. Luxurious food and drinks, says one fragment, in no way protect you from harm. Wealth beyond what is natural is no more use than an overflowing container. Real value is generated not by theatres and baths and perfumes and ointments, but by philosophy. The wall may have crumbled into ruin, but movingly, the ideas inscribed on it retain

17:58 their life and their relevance. It strikes me as a real paradox really that you would have had where people are going shopping, they're sort of carrying their shopping, and then on the wall you've got these reminders that shopping is not necessarily going to make you happy. Yes, the letters of the inscription were red so everyone could see them. So it was all written in red? In red, yes. So you really could have seen it, I mean you could have been at the other side of the marketplace and you would have seen that there was this basically kind of advertisement almost for Epicureanism on the wall. It must have been a beautiful spot, I mean, to have not only philosophy enlightening you, but also a fantastic view onto the surrounding countryside. I can imagine it would have been easy to be wise, not easy, but easier to be wise here. I

18:47 would have done less shopping if I had this wall and this surrounding. It's a pity they didn't do it more, and they don't do it today. I think it's a lovely idea, wall philosophy. If Epicurus and his followers had been alive today, they wouldn't have been sniffy about advertising. They would have enlisted it for their own ends, and for the same reason that Diogenes built his wall, to counter the constant inducements to go shopping with some equally visible inducements to live philosophically. The first idea is basically just kind of dry and ironic kind of statements like, shop your blues away. Right. I've come to the kind of place where Epicureans might have turned, the offices of the advertising agency St

19:35 Luke's, to get ideas for creating some modern public reminders of how to live wisely. The first idea their creative team came up with was a sarcastic campaign satirising the materialistic messages of most ads. Yeah. It is really powerful, and certainly in production terms it takes a number of difficult, but it's very, very cheap. And then even a bit more challenging, be happy with shopping, TV and a yearly holiday. Right, I love that. That really does sum it all up, doesn't it? Yeah. And then finally, just culminating, I think, in this thought, which I thought was the strongest, which was fill that void in your life with the product. Yeah, and you'd have sort of shops advertising, I mean, shops selling these kind of products. and then this kind of stark reminder that perhaps it's not really going to fill any void. That's brilliant. What else

20:21 do you think? Probably the most obvious idea was to just take kind of luxury items and goods and just somehow kind of undermine them or show them for being kind of, you know, a bit shallow or a bit kind of, you know, empty inside. Kind of the best example of that, I thought. was something like this, just taking a lovely image of a beautiful house and kind of just using the language of advertising, the caveats, batteries not included and just changing it to happiness not included. Right, no, I really like that. I mean, in a way that says it all, doesn't it? It says, because it keeps that subtlety of Epicureanism, which is, you could be happy in a house like that, but it's not included. And I think that's the subtlety, it's not It's not saying you won't be happy in that, which would be sort of Marxism. It's just saying it's not

21:09 included, so you better watch out before you spend all your energies trying to get this house. Unfortunately, philosophers have rarely had much money for advertising campaigns. But imagine a world where instead of being surrounded by adverts selling you watches, cars or fancy holidays, these ads reminded you of how important it is to value friends, to escape the rat race or reflect on your problems, and didn't just use these genuinely nice things to sell you aftershave or aperitifs. It's hard to know whether the people of

21:59 Oinoanda discovered what they did need and ceased buying what they didn't because of the giant advertisement in their midst. But Epicurus' central message seems, if anything, more relevant to today's consumer society than it did to his own. And there's no reason to believe that happiness is any more included in the many more things we can buy. Of course, putting up one poster in the Trafford Centre in Manchester couldn't on its own turn back the tide of consumerism. And, although shoppers seemed interested in what my ad was trying to say, I didn't see much evidence of people stopping shopping. But the fact remains. We're horribly confused about what could make us happy. If we really knew what we needed, there are few things we'd be desperate to buy.

22:47 Epicurus makes us think very carefully about the merits of our own society. Of course these societies are enormously wealthy, we can buy almost anything we want in a place like this, full of colourful shops selling wonderfully well-produced goods. And yet, what Epicurus wants us to think is, do places like this really provide us with the key ingredients of happiness? And he thought, and I think he was right, that they don't. Happiness may be difficult to attain, Epicurus admitted that, but he insisted that the obstacles are not primarily financial.